In industry it is often necessary to locate persons or other objects with certain attributes or qualifications. Unfortunately the information or data about the object is not necessarily located in one easily searchable location. Typically information for these objects is stored in data bases and other data structures which are not only distributed but also have different formats. This is illustrated in FIG. 1 in which some data about an object 100 is stored in a relational database, some data is found in a structured data file 104, some takes the form of free text which may be in a separate storage location 106, and yet other data or information about the object 100 may be found in another data format 108 which may be in yet another storage facility. Thus, for example, when searching for objects like employees with certain qualifications, some employee data my be located in a human resource (HR) relational data base while additional employee data may be located in a directory having a hierarchical file format. Furthermore some information about the employee may exist as free text.
In order to locate a specific object (in this example, an employee with certain qualifications), one therefore has to interrogate each of the data sources in turn, as shown in FIG. 1, in which the search request 110 is interpreted and then presented as separate search requests 120, 122, 124, 126 to the various data sources. One approach proposed in the past was to search one of the data sources and use the feedback as part of the input to the next data source. Another approach simply searched each data source independently and then gathered and coordinated the information received from the various data sources. As will be appreciated, this requires significant effort and time, and can become prohibitive as the number of objects and the amount of data associated with each object increases.
Furthermore, data sources may not necessarily include all relevant information. They may for instances have empty fields or fail to include certain attributes about the object even though these constitute relevant data when searching for appropriate objects.
The present invention seeks to address the above problems.